Hack61.Find More Ways to Control Your in-Car Computer
Hack 61. Find More Ways to Control Your in-Car Computer
On the horizon are several new integrated control methods that will make in-car PC control even easier. Some people in the car PC world like to claim that auto manufacturers are a decade behind the technology curve. True, it took years before a single car had MP3 support, and even today almost no new cars support it. The automotive industry has two strong drivers for its technology: the need for minimal price per unit and the need for maximum safety. Thus, expensive computer gadgets that add to driver distraction are the first to get cut in any design effort, and those features that do make it through this powerful filter of cost and litigation-consciousness have to be designed to be cheap and as safe as practical. To a user-interface designer, arguably, no user interface is inherently intuitive. Even the mouse is not intuitive; rather, every desktop computer uses it, and it's a good control method, so people can adapt to new programs easily because they know how to use a mouse. If you have new functionality to add to a car, you have a few choices: use a familiar interface (be it good or bad), or start from scratch and design a new one that, once learned, will be safer and easier to use. 5.8.1. Rotating KnobsAt a recent automotive trade show I visited the booth of a very, very cool company, Immersion Technologies (http://www.immersion.com/automotive), which designs and builds haptic (touch) interfaces for a variety of technology fields, including automotive. In fact, they partnered with BMW to design the iDrive interface. With iDrive, you have a single haptic rotating knob in the center console. The cool thing about it is that it can take on different qualities to allow you to control various applications: it can act like a click knob with hundreds of small angular increments, or with just five positions; it can be an infinitely rotating knob, or rotate around four times and then stop, or it can be configured through the car's embedded software to feel like it only turns 180 degrees and stops hard at 3 and 9 o'clock. As a result, the user can look at the road while operating a complex set of menus, each of which has its own unique feel. You can control all the deep, layered functions of the car, such as climate controls, the radio, and the navigation system, by pressing and rotating just this one knob. Now, there is definitely a learning curve to using the knob. While it is somewhat intuitive, in the sense that people are familiar with using knobs (e.g., to control the volume, tuning, and fade and balance settings on a car radio), we haven't really experienced morphing knobs before. After getting you all excited about Immersion's knob, I have to say that in single-unit quantities these units are prohibitively expensive. I tried to buy one at a trade show, and for the price they quoted me I could buy a Segway. Nonetheless, you can control your media with a much simpler dial at a much lower cost. Contour Design's ShuttleXpress (http://www.contourdesign.com/shuttlepro/shuttlexpress.htm), pictured in Figure 5-7, is a sub-$100 device designed for film editing but applicable to any rapid-scrolling application. It has five configurable buttons (ideal for mapping to CD controls) and two scrolling wheels. The outer, ridged wheel is a shuttle-wheelit can rotate to the right or left, but not all the way around, with the degree of twist indicating how fast it seeks through selections. The top jog-wheel with a recessed finger hole can rotate around and around indefinitelyexcellent for spinning rapidly through thousands of songs. Like handheld remote control programs [Hack #56], the software that accompanies the ShuttleXpress changes the key mappings when you switch applications, so you can customize how different applications react to the shuttle input. Another even smaller, cooler looking device is the Griffin Technology PowerMate (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate/features.php). The PowerMate is a brushed aluminum or black metal jog/shuttle-wheel with a glowing blue programmable light. Although the pretty lights are less useful for in-car applications, the wheel has five "buttons": twist left, twist right, press, press and twist left, or press and twist right. Originally conceived as a huge volume and mute knob, it can be configured to scroll through large media collections, like the ShuttleXpress. Both of these devices, which connect via USB, are small enough to mount between the driver and passenger seats, giving a nice clean look compared to a clunky remote control and requiring less button pressing. 5.8.2. Car PC/Head Unit IntegrationOne of the most obvious but difficult control options for car PCs is head unit integration. Almost every stereo head unit manufactured today has at least an eight-character display and an array of buttons including up, down, left, right, and preset buttons 1 through 6. The display is used for showing CD text, station identifications, and song names sent by terrestrial and satellite radio stations. Figure 5-7. The ShuttleXpress XM has released a new model of their XM receiver, called XM Direct (http://www.xmradio.com/xm_direct/). This unit is universal, costs only $50, and connects to another device, a "digital adapter," that converts it to the proprietary OEM or aftermarket protocol for a variety of head units. Depending on the satellite-ready capabilities of the head unit, the XM Direct unit either displays a simple channel number, like a CD changer, or displays the full text of the channel when possible. Many hackers have figured out the XM Direct protocol, allowing computers to talk to the XM receiver, making the car PC the head unit and allowing it to change stations on the XM radio through the car PC software. This connection can also be reversed, with the car PC connecting to the satellite-ready head unit through the digital adapter. In this configuration, car PC software developers can receive the button presses from the head unit, and send text to be displayed on the head unit, for any application they want! My company (http://www.carbotpc.com) has developed the hardware and software implementing this feature for inclusion in our next car PC, but we are by no means the first or only one. I know of a number of adapter manufacturers (such as In-Dash PC, at http://www.indashpc.org) and individual hackers and car PC frontend developers (such as Frodo, author of FrodoPlayer [Hack #75]) that are working on the same sort of things, and I'm confident that several of them will be available before this book hits the shelves. 5.8.3. Future ControlsMembers of the car PC community are working on several control methods to improve your interaction with your in-car computer. Even though these hacks aren't done yet, they are natural extensions of other hacks in this book and are left as an exercise for the reader. Here are a few of the options that are being developed:
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